One of eight PhD opportunities that will contribute to the ADVENT (Addressing Valuation of Energy and Nature Together) research project.

LEEP announces fully-funded PhD studentship in the Quantitative Analysis of the Environment-Energy Nexus

This studentship is one of eight PhD opportunities that will contribute to the ADVENT (Addressing Valuation of Energy and Nature Together) research project, a research endeavour funded by NERC as part of the RCUK Energy Programme. ADVENT’s core objective is to analyse the consequences of prospective UK energy pathways for natural capital.

The programme of PhD studentships is intended to develop future research capacity at the interface of energy and environmental research. The holders of these studentships will benefit from being part of a large research team and associated project activities, including a series of advanced research training events. ADVENT is also affiliated to the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and the NERC Valuing Nature Programme so there will be opportunities to participate in events run by these initiatives.

This particular PhD studentship will study the optimal spatial design of policies. While the quantitative methods developed in the studentship will be applicable across a broad range of contexts, the particular area of application will concern where to place multiple new energy generation facilities and the transmission infrastructure to connect them to markets. That particular location decision requires trade-offs along multiple dimensions including engineering feasibility, construction costs, market access and, of principal interest, damages to natural capital and the ecosystems services it provides.

This studentship will build on work begun as part of the National Ecosystem Assessment Follow On Project (Bateman, Day et al., 2014) in which techniques of mathematical programming were employed to design optimal spatial policies for the siting of new woodlands in the UK (Day and De Gol, in preparation). Moreover, the studentship will break new academic ground by exploring methods of robust spatial optimization, methods that specifically acknowledge uncertainties in the costs and benefits of the environmental impacts of energy infrastructure siting decisions. The robust optimization routines will search for a spatial configuration of the energy system that, while seeking to optimize net benefits, protects against excessive losses if the costs of ecosystem service damages turn out to be at the extremes of expected ranges.

The studentship will be supervised across two institutions with the student based at the University of Exeter under the supervision of Professor Brett Day with Professor Ian Bateman of the University of Exeter and Dr Paolo Agnolucci of UCL forming the rest of the supervisory team. That team of supervisors spans disciplinary fields providing the student with expertise both in the valuation of ecosystem services but also in the modelling of environmental and energy systems. Over the course of the studentship, the selected student will develop advanced skills in all those areas with particular emphasis on methods for solving problems of optimal spatial policy design under conditions of uncertainty.

For further details including eligibility and how to apply please visit our dedicated page.

Date: 17 March 2016